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Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle
grouchomarxist writes: "Salon has an article about a cryptograph attributed to a certain W. B.
Tyler, possibly a pseudonym for Edgar Allen Poe. There is a $2500 prize for the
person who solves the cryptograph." The Gold-Bug , which rates
a mention in the Salon article, was by far the most spell-binding story in my old Horace Mann Reader, and it's the tale
that first turned me on to The Divine Edgar. Could it be that the reason this cryptograph has remained unsolved for so long is that
it is actually insoluble? Now that would be the ultimate posthumous practical joke. Even if you have no intention of trying
to solve it, take a look -- the cryptograph itself is strangely hypnotic.
An exam I took last year - Stage Three Electrical Engineering :-)
Hey, new open source project, FreePoe! Set this thing up on Distibuted and lets get cracking! Damn, it's late.
-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
There's 105 letters in this code (upper + lower case upside down and right way up + spaces)
But back to your point, for most simple substitution codes, you can also use the rule that t is the second most repeated letter, and most of the time "t?e" maps on to "the". Doesn't everyone know this?
Just a thought -- perhaps the first puzzle, which was apparently reasonably easy to solve, is a clue to this second puzzle?
:)
...MoO!
It could be used as a form of "key" to solve the second...
Or maybe that's just my sick twisted mind enjoying the idea of having people struggle to understand something left behind for 150 years while the clues are sitting right there on the same page
My syntax here is "!" -> Upside down
!TIA is repeated at least twice
!A!mL is repeated at least twice
These are probably "The" and "And"
!i!rz and !irz are both in there
b, !b and K are the only symbols on their own.
Multiple representations of "I" and "A"?
It is obviously a multiply interleaved boustrophedonic text. If you don't know what that means, you have no hope of solving it. I could probably solve the problem given a week or so of hard work, its fairly obvious just from looking at the typesetting as to how it should be solved. But alas, I don't have the time at the moment. The solution is fairly trivial.
My guess is that it is a letter substitution plus translations, governed by the characteristics like Big/Small, Capital/Not, Reversed/Not.
I bet 100+ years ago they didn't have networked supercomputers like we did now, so it should be a cinch. So someone with access the juice, please key in the schema and churn
1. Define degrees of freedom schema
-----------------------------------
a) Capital or not (0,1)
b) Big, Small (0,1)
c) Reversed, or not (0,1)
d) The letter (1..26)
2. Key in the data in this schema
---------------------------------
(1,1,0,D),(1,0,0,R),spc,...
3. Run the damn thing
---------------------
Using a standard dictionary substitution methods for the letters d), using various translations for a), b) and c).
For example, if I defined the letter A to mean "Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle", you'd have no way of telling what the encrypted code A means unless I told you. The cryptographic method might not be that strong, but there just isn't enough data to be decrypted. I wouldn't waste my time with this.
I have assuredly found an admirable resolution to this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.
And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Although this isn't completely on topic, you might want to check out http://members.aol.com/s6sj7gt/mikerav.htm
:)
This is a transformation of the poem "The Raven" converted so the number of letters in each word match the digits in PI. Talk about people with too much time on their hands.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Maybe we are looking at the puzzle in the wrong way. I've been doing a lot of 3d work lately and the first time I saw this puzzle, I felt that it had something to do with a depth.
Look at how some letters extrude out and some go in and some lie in most unusual manner. Also see the cases. There are fonts uses of varying sizes. This gives a very strong feel for depth. The first two letters. Cap D and R with the R being half the size of D, pushing it in. Then the mix of cases and the big OGXEW right up front.
If someone could lay this puzzle in a 3d representation, I'm pretty sure we a solution would open up.
--
And everyone is automatically assuming it is written in english. Oh my, oh my.
Well that is what you get being all alone out there far away all by yourself and so on...
Poe IS cool but the REAL 19th century code mystery is called the Beale cypher. This guy sent the letter below and three code sheets to a friend. Beale's codes were based on documents available in the early 1800s - one was the Declaration of Independence. One code sheet talked about a vault of gold in Bedford County (Virginia, I think) when decoded, and the second listed who got what share of it (not reproduced here). The final code sheet with the gold's location, reproduced below, HAS NEVER BEEN BROKEN....
r ehunt/bllet.htm
, 111,95,84,341. 6 ,2018,40,74. , 124,211,486,225. , 1,94,73,416. 0 ,460,25,485,18. 2 24,961,44,16,401. , 7,219,184,360,780. , 69,128,367,460,17. 5 40,208,121,890. 8 0,99,35,18,21,136. , 37,122,113,6,140. , 116,530,82,568,9. 4 ,326,148,234,18. 1 101,365,92,88,181. , 48,122,85,216,284. 2 16,321,603,14,612. 1 8,61,136,247,819. 6 2,302,294,875,78. 0 00,162,286,19,21. 0 4,86,52,88,16,80. 6 7,890,236,154,211. 1 ,39,210,36,3,19. 3 8,46,172,85,194. 6 ,12,101,418,16,140. 1 1,426,89,72,84. , 16,79,23,16,81,122. 3 14,264,1065,323. 1 2,176,213,71,87,96.
Details at:
http://treasurehunt.miningco.com/hobbies/treasu
The Original Uncoded Letter From Beale
St. Louis, Mo., May 9th, 1822.
Robt. Morris, Esq.:
My Esteemed Friend: - Ever since leaving my comfortable quarters at your house I have been journeying to this place, and only succeeded in reaching it yesterday. I have had altogether a pleasant time, the weather being fine and the atmosphere bracing. I shall remain here a week or ten days longer, then "ho" for the plains, to hunt the buffalo and encounter the savage grizzlies. How long I may be absent I cannot now determine, certainly no less than two years, perhaps longer.
With regard to the box left in your charge, I have a few words to say, and, if you will permit me, give you some instructions concerning it. It contains papers vitally affecting the fortunes of myself and many others engaged in business with me, and in the event of my death, its loss might be irreparable. You will, therefore, see the necessity of guarding it with vigilance and care to prevent so great a catastrophe. It also contains some letters addressed to yourself, and which will be necessary to enlighten you concerning the business in which we are engaged. Should none of us ever return you will please preserve carefully the box for the period of ten years from the date of this letter, and if I, or no one with authority from me during that time demands its restoration, you will open it, which can be done by removing the lock. You will find, in addition to the papers addressed to you, other papers which will be unintelligible without the aid of a key to assist you. Such a key I have left in the hands of a friend in this place, sealed, addressed to yourself, and endorsed not to be delivered until June, 1832. By means of this you will understand fully all you will be required to do.
I know you will cheerfully comply with my request, thus adding to the many obligations under which you have already placed me. In the meantime, should death or sickness happen to you, to which all are liable, please select from among your friends some one worthy, and to him hand this letter, and to him delegate your authority. I have been thus particular in my instructions, in consequence of the somewhat perilous enterprise in which we are engaged, but trust we shall meet long ere the time expires, and so save you this trouble. Be the result what it may, however, the game is worth the candle, and we will play it to the end. With kindest wishes for your most excellent wife, compliments to the ladies, a good word to enquiring friends, if there be any, and assurances of my highest esteem for yourself, I remain as ever,
Your sincere friend, T.J.B.
Beale Code Page II - (This is the decrypt; the original is on the web page above)
I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number "3," herewith:
The first deposit consisted of one thousand and fourteen pounds of gold, and three thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited November, 1819. The second was made December, 1821, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight pounds of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at $13,000.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number "1" describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.
THE LOCALITY OF THE VAULT - (This has never been decoded)
71,194,38,1701,89,76,11,83,1629,48,94,63,132,16
975,14,40,64,27,81,139,213,63,90,1120,8,15,3,12
758,485,604,230,436,664,582,150,251,284,308,231
401,370,11,101,305,139,189,17,33,88,208,193,145
918,263,28,500,538,356,117,136,219,27,176,130,1
436,65,84,200,283,118,320,138,36,416,280,15,71,
39,88,61,304,12,21,24,283,134,92,63,246,486,682
18,64,463,474,131,160,79,73,440,95,18,64,581,34
81,12,103,820,62,116,97,103,862,70,60,1317,471,
346,36,150,59,568,614,13,120,63,219,812,2160,17
872,15,28,170,88,4,30,44,112,18,147,436,195,320
8,120,305,42,58,461,44,106,301,13,408,680,93,86
102,38,416,89,71,216,728,965,818,2,38,121,195,1
55,131,234,361,824,5,81,623,48,961,19,26,33,10,
275,346,201,206,86,36,219,324,829,840,64,326,19
919,861,326,985,233,64,68,232,431,960,50,29,81,
81,360,36,51,62,194,78,60,200,314,676,112,4,28,
921,1060,464,895,10,6,66,119,38,41,49,602,423,9
14,23,111,109,62,31,501,823,216,280,34,24,150,1
17,340,19,242,31,86,234,140,607,115,33,191,67,1
121,67,95,122,216,548,96,11,201,77,364,218,65,6
10,98,34,119,56,216,119,71,218,1164,1496,1817,5
540,232,22,141,617,84,290,80,46,207,411,150,29,
39,261,543,897,624,18,212,416,127,931,19,4,63,9
230,460,538,19,27,88,612,1431,90,716,275,74,83,
1300,1706,814,221,132,40,102,34,868,975,1101,84
324,403,912,227,936,447,55,86,34,43,212,107,96,
428,601,203,124,95,216,814,2906,654,820,2,301,1
202,35,10,2,41,17,84,221,736,820,214,11,60,760.
I read Slashdot with several stories in different windows. When I switched to this one, I got it confused with the previous story's comments.
That must be the answer. The puzzle is an example sendmail.cf.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No, simply because it's often difficult to tell a good troll from someone who's serious..
Yeah, well I was serious. Go look up "boustrophedon" at britannica.com if you think I just made it up. Poe was a clever bastard, and his text obviously contains clues to its own solution as a means to humiliate the solver so they'd see how OBVIOUS the clues were once it was solved. Remember, this was Poe's Parthian shot.
The text runs in two directions, suggesting the regular characters are one text stream, and the upside-down characters are running back the other direction, interleaved with each other. Each type font (upper case, lower case, and small caps, plus inversions) could be a separate text stream, possibly there are 6 different interleaved streams, running in boustrophedonic fashion. I could work it out by brute force, but I don't have time. Good crypto cracking takes time, time I haven't got.
So go ahead and label it a troll, it only shows your own ignorance. Maybe if you'd taken a few liberal arts and humanities courses in college, you'd know about this stuff.
Since I'll probably not spend much time working on this myself (don't want to get fired from my real job that pays the bills), I'll throw out my first thoughts about the cryp.
Perhaps the most obvious observation is that there are really four different sets of characters in the message:
right-side-up UPPER CASE
right-side-up lower case
up-side-down UPPER CASE
up-side-down lower case
If the message isn't obsenely difficult to decode (as with the first message) then there are probably simply four different sets of rules to use with each of the four character types.
A starting place might be to begin with shorter words or common repetitions of characters and begin there.
Simple character replacement isn't all that difficult to decode, but character replacement when you've got 4 times as many encodings could be much more difficult. For instance, the upside "R" and "q" and rightside up "l" and "B" could all be the same letter for instance, making it nearly impossible to identify patterns or repeting characters. Someone want to make some estimates as to the total number of possible encodings?
Is it (26!)^4 or something crazy like that?
(26!)^4 = 2.65 x 10^106
But he certainly looks like he's trying to be 31337 here...
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
I have discovered a truly remarkable solution to this cypher which, unfortunately, is too large to fit in the available bandwidth to this server...
Darn. Just as one dispute was settled, the next begins. Now etoys.com will have to sue Poe postumly for using something that almost looks like their company name... :)
Since you haven't solved anything ... why don't YOU give some money to the OSS community?
At least, he who will solve it will deserve it ...
I repost the appropriate, learnèd and interesting post from our fellow A.C. I'll probably get moderated down, but anyway.
A Hint:
It is obviously a multiply interleaved boustrophe donic text. If you don't know what that means, you have no hope of solving it. I could probably solve the problem given a week or so of hard work, its fairly obvious just from looking at the typesetting as to how it should be solved. But alas, I don't have the time at the moment. The solution is fairly trivial.
It's Textmode Quake running on Ada Lovelace's mechanical computer! I remember reading on freshmeat last century that aalib had been ported to it!
Did anyone notice that the smaller, broken cypher was encoded using alphabetic substitution, but each word was reversed.
"....Another clue was taken from Tyler's correspondence to Poe in which he discussed the difficulty of deciphering text that was written backwards ("eht", rather than "the"), and spaces and punctuation are omitted."
We should not rule this out when/if attempting a brute force dictionary attack.
Secondly, all symbols in use seem to be in one of 8 alphabets:
* upper/lower case
* small/normal size
* right/upside down
What about reading off the characters in each of the alphabets, (ignoring spaces & other alphabets), to create a stream of "normalised" characters. ie. start reading all upper/small/right, then upper/small/upsidedown, etc. From there, attack the concatenated stream as an alphabetic substitution cypher, allowing reversed words.
Of course, we don't know which order to do the alphabets in.
Hmmm. in the best Bletchley Park tradition, we could run all arrangements of 8 character streams in parallel.
Another crypto inspired author and slashdot favorite, Neal 'Cryptonomicon' Stephenson, has his own
crypto challenge.
It is certain to be harder than this one.
I wasted half a day, and have since given up.
Mind you the Poe cypher has been around 150 years, Stephenson's Eruditorum challenge has resisted solution for 1 (and counting.)
Good Luck!
I bet given time we could come up with marginally reasonable algorithms to transform the cypher into, say, the receipt for Toklas Brownies , the Book of the Subgenius, my home phone number... after all, it could be compressed as well as encrypted. Without any idea of what the plaintext could even BE (what language? what alphabet?) how can we expect to know we have the right answer when we get one?
Now there's an idea for an encryption algorithm, one that yields a false plaintext if an incorrect key is used...
Hey, and does anyone care about Negroponte's challenge from the Being Digital hardcover? (Oooh triple encrypted! It's probably just "Yay! Digital!" over and over...)
yeah, ok. back to work
*snicker
I've seen CS professors write less clear code than that.
The crypto thingy looks like it's in good ol' scary Perl anyways...I'd compile it but I'm no good at anything but assembly anymore...damn cprE classes.
LDAA #$80 BITA 0x40 BNE END
If we manage to 'solve' the puzzle, how will we know that our solution is correct?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
eel
llama
aardvark
Remembering all the kinds of encrypt forms I learned as a kid, one of the easiest was to throw in dummy characters (things that never meant anything but helped make things look more confusing). There's a few things to look at here:
1) Possibly, some characters (maybe the ones in all caps, the ones upside-down, or whatever) are just thrown in there to confuse the decryptor.
or 2) The different alignment of characters was meant to allude to different meanings. For example, if this letter could have been secretly written by Poe himself, maybe he based the text on allusions to his different works, or maybe on only one alone. Perhaps each letter alluded to a different word in a work of his.
perhaps 3) The combination of the allignment and case of the letters was only meant to throw people off, and instead means absolutely nothing.
Thinking about Poe's work, this particular code seems to fit. In almost all of his works, he has two sides, the light and dark. The fact that the code has right-side-up, upside-down, upper, and lower case seems to blend in with it. Come to think of it, perhaps it is two messages blended into one?
First off, I know that this COULD be in a different language, meaningless random gibberish, or based on some horribly obscure document. However, I doubt it. Here's my thoughts:
Here's what gets me - no letters are on top of each other. While this sure looks like it was fed into a typewriter and typed over several times with lowercase, smallcaps, and uppercase, upside down and not, it looks like gaps were left by someone who knew that when he got to that exact spot later, he would need a letter there.
Also, I took your advise and looked up boustrophedon (great word by the way) - it means that every line would start at the same side of the page that the last ended on and go in the opposite direction "as the ox plows". If it is written this way, you would have to turn the paper upside down to type the other direction, so the stream would consist of right side up characters from alternating lines, and upside down from the other lines, and then go back the other way.
I think it is more likely that he did something like this:
o Type the entire right side up portion of the message, leaving gaps where he knew the upside down letters would go.
o Turn the paper around
o Type the rest of the message. Done.
The fact that gaps had to be left implies that some planning went into this before the "final copy" was made. He probably had some rough drafts worked out. Also, he was into cryptograms that people worked out as puzzles, not codes that would be unbreakable. I think it's unlikely that there's some obscure text that he used as a key. If I were making a serious attempt at this, I would look for the following:
o Words broken up differently from the spaces in the message.
o Words written backward, or the entire message backward. Or vise versa.
o Dummy characters. Especially at the end (beginning?)
o Different substitution alphabets for different kinds/orientations of characters in the message. (This is doubtful IMHO)
o boustrophedonic writing, like the guy said.
I'm betting it's cheap tricks like this. You can be surprisingly criptic just doing that.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I have a couple of comments. I've been trying to get into Poe's head here, and I am finding that he would specifically be looking for ways to spoil the typical way of solving these cyphers. Like backward words in the previous example.
Since he solved hundreds of these, he is really in tune with what is used to solve these (which are the trails that most of you seem to be following.) I would expect him to try to foil all or most of those techniques.
I believe that it is solveable. It's a bit too perfect to not be (see what I say later.) And from what scant information I have read that Poe has said about these puzzles, he seems like he would be quite opposed to publishing one that didn't work. And man, did he spend some time typing it in just for a hoax.
6 character sets, or a mutiple of 6, gets us dangerously close to 26 with a multiplier of 4 (6 * 4 ?). Maybe conincidence.
Observations:
You all know this already, but I see 6 classes of 26 characters: lg cap normal, sm cap normal, lg lower normal, lg cap inverted, sm cap inverted, lg lower inverted.
The spaces _look_ like they really could represent spaces. Frequency is about right, and spacing of words seems right.
Take a look at the first 3 lines of the cypher and you will find that there are almost no repeated characters (if you provide that he is using 6 "alphabets.") Repeats come in to play after you go on for a while. I think that there is an alphabet cycling routine going on here, so that the frequency would be perfectly flat! There is NO WAY that this is conincidence.
Notice that, unlike normal words, I don't see any words with repeated letters. This is not simple substitution.
Although I haven't really dug in yet, it seems to be that the different character sets happen more in some instances and less in others. The existence of OGXEW in the very beginning seems to me to be a clue of his algorhythm getting "started" and not into perfect hiding quite yet.
For the 2-d or 3-d theories out there (my theory was that upside down letters were to be read from the bottom to the top, etc.), it's just too darn hard to do such perfect flat freqency if you are dealing with multiple threads of meaning throughout the message. Probably would have taken a computer.
Poe is trying to heavily mask frequency analysis.
Well, that's my $.02.. I'd be interested if anyone could build on this.
Since the original jpeg would give an OCR program fits, I gave it my best shot. Am currently encoding it as a two character sequence to handle each letter's orientation. (will be a sub-post).
- --
.= "$_,";
For now, here it is, letter orientations ignored.
To Edgar A. Poe, Esq.
----------- original sequence a square ---------
DR LIK OGXEW PFHFYY NBUH TIA VQSMGQ
XDTBJS SNB ESALNKGYQJCP TVOL HLZGUCC
LTTKRF PR NDDQL VWO HJFXIKFRI GXHYMEE TA
QJETBXPEE YGWPUP BV STAVA NAZ TCGDYRC
DHB YFKXDGF ZCNSMETL RK ORT OFNR ZQH MFG
WCVIEGXHB AML NKU AFKSO IYBJDV BEFSGFLPL
SPZL CEMNSW BGERTH ANJMY SEAYHTAA YAKTXDIX
WG JCP JERK OFQARL NDOTY KCR ORT DJTBGP
SEB DNBLQU LPH NJNJV ALGF DIKY WVO CEPIMXAY
SYJZ EIF KMK XYKSSG HTITAW QBP QTLC DEYJ RVV
UQRCPME NK VFHV LDAH XMKTIAX YE VJR ADFHW
XQCMKUYWEKA GS B AGOIY NMEY RPC GIOQBG
NBTEMMQ NK LCOPR SVIBPLSI NZQ DGTJH YDUGF
RZNK CTE YL W TX JDMNARUFQX GDHYFBRI
BZNL LBTPH FW EETOYDK TIA VIRQMFTV
VVEHQLP DHB NNGJ WC MTEUJYRTF JDV HPHR
KYSXTCEFA GS AML LQIGMXAR WC NFUIKY PM
AGGB MJG ARNWADQ CMR IRZ XRHOEL KSYWTB
CFG JC YK FJEO IDBLSTP IKRZ VNKADQ CTXH
QDJW QCJPPE LUDFA K ADTV B GERPEC UTA VJYI
KJ EMY IW GDF
-----------------------------------------------
A frequency counter.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
@sequence=;
foreach(@sequence)
{
chomp;
foreach(split(//))
{
$freq{$_}++;
}
}
foreach (sort(keys(%freq)))
{
$temp=$freq{$_};
$byvalue{$temp}
}
foreach (reverse(sort(numeric(keys(%byvalue)))))
{
chop($byvalue{$_});
print "$byvalue{$_} has a frequency of $_ \n";
}
sub numeric
{
if ($a ;
for ($i=0; $i 90;
print chr($j);
}
}
print "\n";
}
print "---- NEXT SHIFT ----\n";
}
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
About a week ago, I asked my brother to make me a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, since he was making himself one - i figured it wouldn't be too much trouble.
:)
He said no.
10 minutes ago, he knocks on my door and hands me a PB&J on potato rye. As he is walking out the door, I say "thank you"... but with a mouth full of PB&J, it sounded something like "TbRfaamQz".
Thats when i figued it out... I figured out the encryption algorighim!!!!
After discovering the secret to PB&J encryption, reversing the cycle and finding the cypher for reverse PB&J encoding was quite easy.
Now go make yourself a sandwich, read the encrypted page, and enjoy! I won't spoil the answer here, you'll enjoy it much more if you taste it for yourself
Vorro
---------------------------
A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.
____________________________
What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."
Actually, it was just an early entry in the Obfuscated DeCSS Contest.
Work for Change & GET PAID!